Vireo Is Buying Florida’s No. 2 Chain. It Sells Less.

At the start of this year, Vireo Growth had never sold a gram of cannabis in Florida. It has not, as of this writing, finished buying a single Florida licence outright. And yet three transactions — one closed, two pending — would give the Minneapolis company 108 of Florida's 779 dispensaries: the second-largest store network in the state, behind Trulieve's 170 and ahead of Verano's 86.

That is the fastest anyone has assembled a retail position in a market where you cannot simply open a store. Florida issues vertically integrated licences, each one obliged to grow, process and sell its own product, and for most of the past decade there were only 22 of them. The only way in is to buy somebody who already has one.

The question is what Vireo actually bought.

The three deals

Green Dragon, via Eaze — closed. Vireo announced the purchase of Eaze in December 2025 for about $47 million in stock, roughly 84 million shares at a deemed $0.56, plus an earn-out tied to 2026 earnings. Eaze brought 39 active Green Dragon stores in Florida and about 64,000 square feet of canopy, along with California delivery and 14 Colorado dispensaries. The deal closed on 1 April 2026. By the week we measured, Green Dragon was operating 41 Florida stores.

FLUENT, via Cansortium — pending. Announced 30 April 2026, all stock, with $30 million of FLUENT's senior secured debt equitized into shares first and then exchanged into Vireo paper at closing. FLUENT shareholders approved the arrangement on 28 July and the company said it would seek the final Ontario court order on 4 August. Vireo has guided to a fourth-quarter close. FLUENT runs 33 Florida stores and did about $71.5 million of Florida revenue last year.

Planet 13 — pending. Announced 27 July 2026, all stock, at a 16.6% premium to Planet 13's 20-day average price. It brings the Las Vegas superstore, one Illinois shop, and 34 Florida dispensaries with two production facilities. It still needs a stockholder vote, an effective registration statement, exchange approval and state regulators. No closing date has been given.

Add them up and you get 108 doors. Vireo's own materials say roughly 106; the difference is the week you count.

What the doors actually sell

Here is where the state data stops flattering the transaction.

In the week of 5–11 September, those three chains dispensed 53.8 million milligrams of THC between them — 12.4% of everything sold in Florida. That is third place by volume, not second: Trulieve did 25.6% and Verano's MÜV did 13.0%. A network with 27% more stores than MÜV sells less product than MÜV does.

Per store, the three brands are a study in variance. Milligrams of THC dispensed per store, in the week of 5–11 September:

• FLUENT — 33 stores, 643,927
• Green Dragon — 41 stores, 550,400
• Planet 13 — 34 stores, 292,253
• All three together — 108 stores, 497,709
• Florida state average — 556,905

The combined figure lands 11% below the state average, and about 24% below Trulieve's 654,000. FLUENT, the piece that is not yet closed, is the only one of the three that beats the state average. Planet 13's Florida stores are the weak link: among the eleven Florida chains with 24 or more dispensaries, only Surterra moves less per door.

That matters more in Florida than it would elsewhere. There is no wholesale market here. A store can only sell what its own licence grew, so a thin per-store number is usually a cultivation problem, and cultivation takes quarters to fix, not weeks. Vireo is buying roughly 329,000 square feet of Florida canopy across the three deals. Whether that is enough to lift 108 stores is the whole thesis.

The licence that lost 84% of its value

Planet 13's Florida history is the cleanest illustration of what a Florida licence has been worth, and it is worth retelling because Vireo is now buying the end of it.

In 2021 Planet 13 paid Harvest Health & Recreation $55 million in cash for a Florida licence with no stores and no revenue. It never built the business. In 2023 it agreed to buy VidaCann — 26 operating dispensaries — for $48.9 million, and because Florida allows one licence per owner, it had to sell the original. That licence went to SGW FL Enterprises, the vehicle behind Fino Cannabis, for about $9 million, closing in April 2024 after the state approved the transfer.

Same licence, three years apart, 84% less money. We wrote about what that repricing did to the 22 licences the state issued this month in Florida Just Issued 22 Cannabis Licences Worth a Fraction of What They Used to Be.

Planet 13's recent numbers are not comforting either. Its first-quarter 2026 revenue fell 24.8% to $21.1 million and its net loss roughly quadrupled to $8.1 million, and it substantially exited California in February. Vireo is paying a premium for a company that was retrenching.

Who is doing the buying

Vireo's chief executive and co-executive chairman since December 2024 is John Mazarakis, a co-founder of Chicago Atlantic, one of the larger lenders in American cannabis. The roll-up began as a Chicago Atlantic transaction: in December 2024 Vireo agreed to buy Proper Brands in Missouri, Deep Roots Harvest in Nevada and WholesomeCo in Utah for about $397 million in stock, alongside a $75 million equity raise that Chicago Atlantic supported. Since then Vireo has added Schwazze, Eaze, Hawthorne Gardening, Bridgewell, parts of PharmaCann, C21 Investments and assets from Cannabist, and has announced Planet 13 and four Ohio businesses.

One detail deserves attention: Chicago Atlantic Financial Services is the administrative agent on the FLUENT credit facility whose $30 million is being converted to equity in Vireo's own acquisition. The chief executive's firm sits on the lending side of a deal his company is the buyer in. Vireo disclosed Chicago Atlantic as a related party under Canadian takeover rules when it backed the equity financing, and the FLUENT transaction is being run through a special committee chaired by an independent director. Both of those are the normal safeguards. They are also an acknowledgement that the safeguards are needed.

The financial picture is a company growing by purchase, not by sale. Second-quarter revenue was $209.3 million, up 335%, with $41.5 million of adjusted earnings — but $33.5 million of that revenue is not cannabis at all, it is the hydroponics business it bought from Scotts Miracle-Gro. Vireo also publishes a pro forma revenue figure, $254.9 million, that assumes deals closed earlier than they did; in the first quarter the pro forma number was nearly double the actual one. The company finished June with $122.7 million of cash against $257.2 million of long-term debt, and its share count has been through a 30-for-1 consolidation, which makes every historical per-share figure a translation exercise.

What still has to happen

Florida has a gate the press releases skip past. Under Rule 64-4.018 of the Florida Administrative Code, any transfer of 51% or more of a treatment centre's ownership is a change of ownership requiring the Department of Health's approval. A change of management alone does not count; a change of control does. The state has to bless it, and the office is in the middle of replacing its emergency rules on licensure and transfers with permanent ones.

We could find no public record of the department approving — or receiving, or denying — change-of-control filings for Green Dragon, FLUENT or Planet 13. Vireo's releases say only “regulatory approvals in each market.” The best available benchmark is Planet 13's own 2024 licence sale, which took about three months from signing to state sign-off.

So the honest version of the headline is this: Vireo has closed on 41 Florida stores and has agreements covering 67 more. Until the state signs, 108 is a plan, not a position.

What to watch

Whether the FLUENT court order and the state transfer land inside the fourth quarter. Whether Planet 13's per-store number moves at all once somebody else is running those stores — it is the clearest test of whether this is a cultivation problem or an operator problem, and Florida has already run that experiment once, when Sunburn took MedMen's fifteen stores and made them among the most productive in the state. Whether the hydroponics revenue keeps flattering the growth rate. And whether 108 doors averaging under half a million milligrams a week is a bargain or a warning.

Methodology: Florida store counts, weekly volume and sales per store are ours, calculated from the OMMU weekly dispensation table for the week of September 5–11, 2026, with brands mapped to ultimate owners by hand. “Sales” means dispensed milligrams of THC; Florida does not publish dollar sales. Deal terms, financial results and leadership facts come from Vireo Growth and FLUENT releases and SEC filings, cited below. Planet 13's quarterly figures and the valuation critique are from mg Magazine's July 30, 2026 analysis. Florida's change-of-ownership requirement is Rule 64-4.018, F.A.C., under s. 381.986(8), Fla. Stat. We have not independently confirmed the status of any Florida change-of-ownership filing.